James S. A. Corey Quotes

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.

He was grandiose. He was ruthless. He was a genius at a couple of things and under the misapprehension that it meant he was smart about everything. But in his mind, he was doing the right thing.

Klinger knew nothing about him but what she’d been told by Laconia. She would have been just as solicitous to anyone who had come in his position. And if someone else had been in her role, he would have treated them the same way he did her. They weren’t people to each other. They were roles. This was etiquette, and the inauthenticity of the situation oppressed him.

There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.

There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?

Same here, Cap'n," Amos said. "I got a lot of past in my past.

It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real.

But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them. ...
Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.

Teresa seemed older than adolescent Jim had been, both more knowledgeable about the universe and angrier with it. Maybe the two went hand in hand.

Sorry," Bobby said…"I'm pissed at you right now and it's not your fault.
What can I stop not doin' so it ain't my fault anymore?

Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?

Bobbie felt the pressure of time slipping away like she was watching a door close, with her on the wrong side of it.

We knew that, though.
We suspected it.
Do we know it now?
We suspect it harder," Elvi said. "We're scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we're wrong.

Insects buzzed about, still the best-designed pollinating system there was. Technology did a lot of things well, but evolution had it beat when it came to environmental systems.